contourtrails's comments

I'm with you, prohibition of weed is very backwards. But that's hardly slavery.

How so? Economic circumstances negatively impact certain people more than others in the world but how are modern western governments perpetuating racism?

They broke laws and are being punished as criminals. Many people of all races are punished in the same way.

I think drug laws in this country are way too harsh, but those are the laws. People should not break them if they don't want to be jailed.

Also slavery was a human problem for thousands of years, it took humanity collectively waking up to the evils of slavery to abolish it. Human governments the world over supported the instition in the past, and now they've evolved. Don't judge them today based on the mistakes of the past.

>"What does the NSA so? Who are they protecting?

You're comitting a logical fallacy. You think just because bad things sometimes do happen to US citizens that the NSA clearly isn't doing anything....

Clearly faulty logic. I'm glad the NSA exists because there are bad actors out there and we need informed law enforcement to protect us.

No, that particular case was a completely justified use of lethal force.

Police we're being directly fired upon. Should officers not fire back when they are fired upon?

That's naive, there will always be people looking to subvert the system because they want to see the world burn.

It's funny, some people are so opposed to increasing capabilities of law enforcement but they conveniently ignore that the capabilities of criminals are increasing too.

Law enforcement should be as many steps ahead of criminals as possible, provided their capabilities do not infringe on our rights as citizens.

I'm not arguing about anything, I'm just stating facts

I'm pretty sure that a minority group - Asian Americans - do much better than their white counterparts on the GRE. Don't paint this "white males vs everyone else" narrative since it's patently not true.

The score differences between racial and gender groups are quite small. Significant score differentials between individual test takers likely indicates more about their innate abilities than some hidden test bias.

I think in general social media is hostile to conservative viewpoints because most social media users are young.

There's really not much social media companies can do if someone gets downvoted into oblivion because 90% of people viewing a comment thread are under the age of 25 and more likely to be liberal as a result.

That said, companies like Reddit need to be careful that they don't automatically interpret something like criticism of illegal immigration as hate speech. Of course such criticism certainly could be framed in such a way that it is hate speech, but it's very possible to not be hateful while discussing illegal immigration and similarly sensitive issues. Yet therein lies the grey.

It's not really that way.

The universe has produced things that basically must exist given the laws of physics (when certain chemicals exist together under certain conditions we know they will react in certain ways, etc).

We are one of those things, and the things we make are things that we are compelled to make by our very nature.

So it's not chance. Our universe as constructed necessarily gives rise to the things we see and experience.

>"The Third Reich was a diagnosis regime, obsessed with sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, religion, politics, sexuality..."

It's never good to categorize people like that.

Many groups throughout history have done it for many different reasons, some less sinister than others, some with very good intentions in mind...

But ultimately it's not about the intention, it's about the mindset that accompanies putting infinitely complex individuals into neat little baskets.

It's obvious when we read about the Nazi's doing it that it's bad, but remember in the modern day when other groups try to do it - even with virtuous intentions - that it's still bad.

Hive mind exists everywhere, the goal is to not encourage it.

What is the purpose? What will downvoting enable aside from downvoting itself?

I have a sense it will only worsen the mob mentality on Facebook and make it more like Reddit.

I don't have much sympathy for major news organizations because they are publishing opinions more than they are publishing breaking news based on investigative journalism.

Of course I can't blame them, because the industry's economic reality is that a certain number of articles must be published every day, and opinions are just much more plentiful and easier to source than breaking news.

Yet the broader reality is that Facebook has no obligation to society at large to deliver these opinion pieces to the masses. In fact by doing so, Facebook (and the internet more broadly) contributes to social unrest and polarization by constantly feeding people opinions that reinforce their own.

Facebook should be reducing the visibility of such content on its network.

Certainly high quality opinions exist, and they do have value. And intellectual content usually holds at least some kernel if opinion. But the problem is the pile-on, the crowd-fury, the group-think that always seems to accompany and eventually overpower those few reasoned opinions that exist.

The root problem is the avalanche of opinions that assaults our rationality whenever anything happens in the world. We need to slow things down to reduce the group-think, to give people room to breathe and the reasoned opinions to be heard and not shouted down.

Hence my belief that Facebook should reduce its bandwidth for opinion ("news").

The next season of Black Mirror may just be a documentary on China

Start with Mozart, move to Beethoven. Wrapping your head around classical styles is easier when you directly compare the Classical and Romantic styles since they are quite different. That gives you a foundation to understand other forms.

But you read my comment, so you know I'm not saying what I am saying "because whatever", I'm saying it because in general I disagree with isolation and am in favor of partnership and integration.

Obviously one incubator will not have a major impact on society, but we are talking about the sort of thinking that leads to the creation of a non-male incubator and the value of the concept in general.

Your attitude is a tempting one, but it is socially harmful in the long run. The issue is that women are actually doing more social harm than good by isolating themselves.

The more that women work side by side with men on equal footing in the workplace, establishing this as a social norm, over time the less frequently sexism will manifest itself.

Consider racial integration of baseball in America. Jackie Robinson faced terrible racism as the first black man to play MLB baseball. However this did not dissuade him from playing in what had traditionally been a white man's league. He welcomed the opportunity to be a pioneer in the face of abuse and in doing so he paved the way for other black men to join the league.

Racism has significantly receded in MLB, in large part because of pioneers like Jackie Robinson.

If Jackie Robinson had thought like you and the women who want to sequester themselves, then the progress of racial integration may have been impacted.

The issue is that the population sequestering itself in an isolated working space is stepping away from unity and partnership and backwards towards fear and mistrust.

We learn to work together by actually working together. It's tempting to isolate yourself sometimes, but partnership is more fruitful in the long run, assuming your partner is willing to work with you. I believe it is the case that the vast majority of men are capable of and willing to work respectfully with women in the workplace and are extending a hand of friendship, so to speak.